Sitting at the AYME Conference (Association of Youth Ministry Educators), I was eager to reflect on the chosen theme of incarnation and wrestle with it a bit. Wrestling is a good thing in my mind. We have to get our heads engaged sometimes and challenge those ideas or viewpoints that don’t always make sense to us. The end result should be clarity in our convictions. I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with either the concept or the term. This of course depends on what exactly one means by incarnational ministry. The term is used by different people in ways that make sense to them. My discomfort with the idea came in college when I first heard the phrase in Young Life leadership training. My understanding at that point was that incarnational ministry and relational ministry were basically interchangeable terms. The notion was explained that because God came into the world in the form of a man (Jesus) in order to bring us the good news, we should enter the world of the teenager for the same purpose. My discomfort then was the weight that it put on the relationships I should build with students. It all seemed so dependent on me. The term itself did not bother me, though I did not use it much. Years later I would meet people who were very unhappy with the term itself but not with the idea of relational ministry. For some of them the theological underpinnings were entirely too catholic in nature and as reformed thinkers, incarnational ministry was an unacceptable phrase. A few years later yet, I would meet people who challenged the idea of incarnation as a model for ministry. It simply is not biblical, some would argue.
So, sitting at the conference, the first speaker up was Chap Clark, a man who has had a very long career based on this idea. He engaged in incarnational ministry in Young Life and later taught the idea to others through Young Life training and then as a seminary professor. I was hoping to hear Chap define the concept and give it some solid biblical rooting. I was let down. I have no beef with Chap, but I was really looking for a scriptural basis that could not be easily refuted. He gave us John 20:21 “Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” (ESV) The question in my head then was simply this. Was Jesus sending in precisely the same way or figuratively the same way? The difference may seem like splitting hairs, but there is a difference. Are we to be Jesus for someone else? Or are we being sent to proclaim the gospel? Incarnation means that God became man. Jesus was God in the flesh. This is an act that took place in history. We are already carnate, so we cannot become incarnate. So, I was not persuaded by this verse. He then took us to 1 Thessalonians 2 and suggested that as a model of incarnation. I have studied and taught that passage and I don’t see anything more than an example for us of relational ministry. It is descriptive of Paul’s ministry to the church in Thessalonica. While there was nothing about Chap’s comments on that pasage that I disagreed with, I simply did not see it supporting the idea of incarnation as a model for ministry. Paul uses the term ambassador to describe the role of those who are sent to proclaim the good news. We are God’s ambassadors. That is a different thing that being God in the flesh. Chap shared something though that I really found helpful. He quoted a theologian named Darrell Guder who said “there is a danger in making an adjective out of the noun incarnation”. I did not get the sense from Chap that Guder rules out the concept of incarnational ministry but gives his warning about the terminology. So I got wondering what the origin of the phrase is. Who first gave us the concept of incarnational ministry? The last thing that struck me in Chap’s presentation was during the Q&A. He was asked to define incarnational and relational ministry and was asked if they were interchangeable phrases. Chap said that he sees relational ministry as a subset of incarnational ministry. Incarnational is the mission of the church (John 20:21) and relational falls under that. He suggested that not every ministry is relational.
So, my mind stirred, I got into conversations with people about this idea. For many in youth ministry, the concept is so accepted as a given that questioning it seems rather odd. Later in the conference, a panel wrestled with a scenario relating to incarnational ministry. The discussion in the panel went all over the place but we hit one point when a woman stood up and stated that without wishing to offend anyone, she was not comfortable with using the term incarnation in the same sentence as the word model. I wanted to jump up and applaud! Later I made contact with her to learn more about her views. She shared with me a paper she had written on her issues with the notion of incarnational ministry. It was fantastic! I’ll share a summary of that real soon.
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